Everyone loves Mayor Ed Lee — for now

Mayor Ed Lee might not have been elected unanimously Tuesday, but you wouldn’t have known it walking through the city’s neighborhoods with him today.

Everyone loves a winner and panhandlers, school kids, folks driving by and merchants with “Leland Yee for Mayor” signs in their store windows all assured the new mayor that they were 100 percent behind him on election day.

“I would have had your sign in my window, but my landlord wouldn’t let me put it up,” one grocer along San Bruno Avenue told Lee as he strolled along the business corridor, one of four stops he made in what was dubbed “a thank you tour” of the city.

“I’ve always talked about how wonderful our neighborhoods are and wanted to make sure I went right back out there,” Lee told reporters outside the Sunset Super market on Irving Street near 26th Avenue in the Sunset. “This is better than mayoral debates, better than bar crawls, better than campaigning. This is what I like to do.”

Lee, traveling with his wife, Anita, opened his day in Chinatown, then visited businesses along Irving Street, San Bruno Avenue in the Bayview and West Portal, shaking hands, posing for pictures and thanking people for their votes.

Lee was accompanied by Supervisor Carmen Chu in the Sunset District, Supervisor Malia Cohen in the Bayview and Supervisor Sean Elsbernd in West Portal, a show of unity that wasn’t lost on Lee.

While the extent of the rancor that accompanied the election surprised him, that’s just “water under the bridge,” Lee said, adding that it was now time for everyone to work together to improve the city.

Lee’s tour de San Francisco also showed just how important his election was to the city’s fast-growing Asian community.

When he walked into the Lam Hoa Thuan restaurant on Irving Street, for example, there was a flurry as diners broke out their cell phone cameras and pushed up to greet the city’s first Asian American mayor.

“Some of (Lee’s) best sound bytes are in Cantonese,” said Christine Falvey, the mayor’s spokeswoman.